Free A Density of Souls by Christopher Rice Page B

paper.
    “I try to write about the truth,” he said, his gaze nearly lost in the dusk. “If you don’t like the truth, or if you blame me for it, well then, maybe you are a little bit stupid!”
    The silence between them was punctuated by the drone of cicadas and the bleat of a horn as a ship pushed up the Mississippi.
    “I want to make love to you!” he finally declared to the darkness.
    She convulsed with laughter that bent her at the waist, then put her hands to her lips.
    “You’re laughing?”
    The Falling Impossible
    59
    “Yes,” Monica gasped.
    “Why?”
    “Because you sound like a little boy!” she said, patting back the locks of hair.
    “People want other people,” Jeremy said in a measured, authoritative tone. “And the only way for them to get—”
    He halted. She saw the shadow of him shake back and forth, as if to shed itself of the thought.
    “I write about you all the time. Even when you’re sleeping, I write about you. And take something from you with everything I write. I won’t do that anymore unless I’m sure I can give you something in return.”
    Every July, Samuel and Amelia Conlin drove out of New Orleans, stopping in Biloxi, Mississippi, for dinner and then staying at the Grand Hotel in Point Clear, Alabama. When Jeremy announced he would not be going with them, they were neither surprised nor upset.
    A listless unease had overtaken their son since his graduation from Jesuit High School. However, they both knew it could be worse. Jeremy’s room did not reek of marijuana and he preferred classical music—Mahler, in fact—over the Beatles. They had no idea he planned on copulating with a girl from the wrong side of Magazine Street in every room of the house.
    When Monica first entered the Conlin residence, she was struck most by the way the light from the chandelier sparkled across what seemed at first to be a sea of glass—a profusion of glass etageres hous-ing sets of crystal and mirrors that forced her to realize that with the exception of two front windows and a bathroom mirror there was not a shard of glass in her own shotgun house on Constance Street. She exclaimed over the front parlor drapes, to which Jeremy responded,
    “All that cloth to make a window seem more purposeful!”
    When Monica laughed, Jeremy stayed still in the doorway. His gaze on her softened. She met his eyes, seeing that he seemed more comfortable in his own home with her now in it.
    One stifling August night, when she was sixteen, Monica awoke to find the half-crippled Willie Rizzo standing over her bed. She screamed, flailed one arm at him, and sent him stumbling backward across her 60
    A Density of Souls
    bedroom on his bad leg until he fell with a pathetic gasp. Monica’s anger turned to pity. Just the sight of her naked body was a gift Willie desired. Feeling like the possessor of some strange secret, she let him stare at her for three minutes before she slid into her nightgown and guided him through the house and out the front door.
    It was the closest Monica had ever come to sex, and she assumed that lying pinned and burning beneath Jeremy Conlin wouldn’t be much different. All pain with a tinge of awe. But the burning of Jeremy inside her turned into a warm bath that washed through her legs. His black hair brushed against her chin, sending tingles down her sternum, making Monica aware of every single inch of skin she possessed. And beyond that skin was the hard and dedicated press of Jeremy Conlin—who, for all his passion, brooding, and poetry, had finally organized his muscles toward a single goal.
    That night, as Monica slept with her head on Jeremy’s bare chest, Samuel Conlin’s Buick lost a back tire. The tire went spinning out from the car with such velocity that the driver behind him thought it was an animal darting across the foggy highway. The Buick plunged through the guardrail and a green wash of water slammed into the windshield. Samuel and Amelia Conlin were carried to the